A Ford, not a Cadillac

Here’s something sure to generate a torrent of blog hits — an item on a dead 90-year-old actor whose best work was before even my time.

Glenn Ford, who was found dead in his Los Angeles home Wednesday, wasn’t particularly flashy. He never won an Oscar. Never even got nominated. He certainly wasn’t my favorite actor, and I haven’t seen the films critics generally cite as his best work — “The Blackboard Jungle” (1955), “The Teahouse on the August Moon” (1956) and “The Big Heat” (1953). But he was in two movies I enjoyed a great deal — “Fate Is the Hunter” (1964) and “Midway” (1976).

In “Fate,” he played an airline executive trying to get to the bottom of a crash that left only one survivor and was initially blamed on the pilot, who was his friend. The plot sounds eerily like the recent commuter-jet crash in Kentucky, although in this case it was more a series of small mistakes (instead of one big one) and just plain bad luck that were to blame.

The scene I remember is Ford, despairing of ever getting to the bottom of the crash, testifying in a hearing (and shocking those in attendance) that fate was to blame; that it was just the victims’ time to go.

“Midway” suffered from “Titanic” syndrome, in that a contrived romance was woven into a story that was plenty interesting on its own. The tale of an outgunned American fleet turning the tide against the Japanese in 1942 didn’t need a young fighter pilot’s (Edward Albert’s) romance with a Japanese-American girl any more than the sinking of the unsinkable liner needed Leo and Kate having sex in a car.

Because of the romanic intrigue, it takes forever to get to the actual battle. When it finally does happen, Ford is steady as a rock as Rear Admiral Ray Spruance, a cruiser skipper chosen by “Bull” Halsey to take his place when Halsey came down with a skin malady and was quarantined. He’s a man of few words and quick, decisive action.

Writing for Movie Magazine International, critic Monica Sullivan calls Ford “Icky,” but then realizes he’s in many of her favorite movies. “No matter how many times I tried to tell myself that the real reason I kept watching those movies was his co-stars or his directors or the screenplays, all I could come up with was who could have played the parts that Glenn Ford played as well as he did?”